It is
a strange affair to be an emigrant, as I hope you shall see in a
future work. I wonder if this will be legible; my present station
on the waggon roof, though airy compared to the cars, is both dirty
and insecure. I can see the track straight before and straight
behind me to either horizon. Peace of mind I enjoy with extreme
serenity; I am doing right; I know no one will think so; and don't
care. My body, however, is all to whistles; I don't eat; but, man,
I can sleep. The car in front of mine is chock full of Chinese.

MONDAY. - What it is to be ill in an emigrant train let those
declare who know. I slept none till late in the morning, overcome
with laudanum, of which I had luckily a little bottle. All to-day
I have eaten nothing, and only drunk two cups of tea, for each of
which, on the pretext that the one was breakfast, and the other
dinner, I was charged fifty cents. Our journey is through ghostly
deserts, sage brush and alkali, and rocks, without form or colour,
a sad corner of the world. I confess I am not jolly, but mighty
calm, in my distresses. My illness is a subject of great mirth to
some of my fellow-travellers, and I smile rather sickly at their
jests.

We are going along Bitter Creek just now, a place infamous in the
history of emigration, a place I shall remember myself among the
blackest. I hope I may get this posted at Ogden, Utah.

R. L S.

Letter: TO SIDNEY COLVIN

[COAST LINE MOUNTAINS, CALIFORNIA, SEPTEMBER 1879.]

HERE is another curious start in my life. I am living at an Angora
goat-ranche, in the Coast Line Mountains, eighteen miles from
Monterey. I was camping out, but got so sick that the two
rancheros took me in and tended me. One is an old bear-hunter,
seventy-two years old, and a captain from the Mexican war; the
other a pilgrim, and one who was out with the bear flag and under
Fremont when California was taken by the States. They are both
true frontiersmen, and most kind and pleasant. Captain Smith, the
bear-hunter, is my physician, and I obey him like an oracle.

The business of my life stands pretty nigh still. I work at my
notes of the voyage. It will not be very like a book of mine; but
perhaps none the less successful for that. I will not deny that I
feel lonely to-day; but I do not fear to go on, for I am doing
right. I have not yet had a word from England, partly, I suppose,
because I have not yet written for my letters to New York; do not
blame me for this neglect; if you knew all I have been through, you
would wonder I had done so much as I have. I teach the ranche
children reading in the morning, for the mother is from home sick.
- Ever your affectionate friend,

R. L. S.

Letter: TO SIDNEY COLVIN

MONTEREY, DITTO CO., CALIFORNIA, 21ST OCTOBER [1879].

MY DEAR COLVIN, - Although you have absolutely disregarded my
plaintive appeals for correspondence, and written only once as
against God knows how many notes and notikins of mine - here goes
again. I am now all alone in Monterey, a real inhabitant, with a
box of my own at the P.O. I have splendid rooms at the doctor's,
where I get coffee in the morning (the doctor is French), and I
mess with another jolly old Frenchman, the stranded fifty-eight-
year-old wreck of a good-hearted, dissipated, and once wealthy
Nantais tradesman. My health goes on better; as for work, the
draft of my book was laid aside at p. 68 or so; and I have now, by
way of change, more than seventy pages of a novel, a one-volume
novel, alas! to be called either A CHAPTER IN EXPERIENCE OF ARIZONA
BRECKONRIDGE or A VENDETTA IN THE WEST, or a combination of the
two. The scene from Chapter IV. to the end lies in Monterey and
the adjacent country; of course, with my usual luck, the plot of
the story is somewhat scandalous, containing an illegitimate father
for piece of resistance. . . . Ever yours,

R. L. S.

Letter: TO SIDNEY COLVIN

MONTEREY, CALIFORNIA, SEPTEMBER 1879.

MY DEAR COLVIN, - I received your letter with delight; it was the
first word that reached me from the old country.